1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the technical field of data encryption and, more particularly, to a device and method of applying a parity operation to encrypt data for protection.
2. Description of Related Art
Due to the importance of intellectual properties, manufactories typically encrypt their intellectual property (IP) related data, including programs, off-line for data protection and store the data encrypted in a non-volatile memory or storage medium, such that an unauthorized person cannot restore the data even if he/she obtains the memory or storage medium with the data encrypted.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,408,073 granted to Hsu, et al. for an “Scramble circuit to protect data in a read only memory” discloses a scramble circuit for protecting data stored in a read-only memory (ROM) by applying both a pseudo-random generator and an initial value seed1/seed2 to code ROM data and thus generates encoded data. However, since the scrambling technology uses random numbers as parameters, such a data protection method requires a synchronous random generator for decoding. It also needs many patterns of random numbers to effectively prevent an unauthorized person from retrieving data, programs, which means that a pseudo random generator for encoding and decoding needs highly complicated circuitry. Thus, the cost increases dramatically. On the contrary a simpler pseudo random generator for encoding and decoding can be used to save the cost, but in this way, data and programs can be retrieved by an unauthorized person easily.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved device and method to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.